SKY-HI on the SOCIAL INNOVATION WEEK 2022 stu special pannel

[connie44]

On November 11, 2022, SKY-HI was part of the stu SPECIAL SESSION pannel on the SOCIAL INNOVATION WEEK 2022, a Japanese business-centered event.

stu is a company that works with BMSG in the shooting of music videos.

The panel was comprised of SKY-HI, Tanaka Shinichi (screenwriter/film director), Kuroda Takayasu (stu CEO), Lauren Rose Kocher (stu COO), and Osada Shinko (executive producer of the SOCIAL INNOVATION WEEK).

You can find the full panel video here and read the modelpress coverage here.

I've summarized the important talking points of the event below

 

-people from the USA who like kpop buy korean products (electronics, etc) because kpop idols promote them

-you start liking kpop, but then you start liking korea as a whole as a consequence (the entertainment industry promotes its home country, this is something that actually happens and it's known the korean government backs kpop up)

-for Japan, lack of sales=lack of budget=good products aren't produced=the fanbases don't grow=young talent doesn't wanna debut in jpop and looks to kpop instead. Consequence: japanese entertainment is on its way out if it sticks to domestic demand

-this is why he's comitted to making good MVs for BE:FIRST, he wants them to be good quality. He says disclosing these numbers [the MV production details on the image below] might be a bit controversial because it means the competition might take advantage of that, but he thinks that that's important so the system can change and quality for the industry increases overall.

-production for the MVs is quick in general because he thinks about the boys on a daily basis and knows them really well, so he can figure out what their roles will be in both the songs and the MVs

-his goal with BMSG is to change the entertainment industry and he says he's gotten a lot of support from people in the industry. he thinks this sense of crisis he's talked about many times is very real and something everyone is feeling. he also wants to win grammys lmao

-he keeps mentioning wanting BMSG to be something that is loved all around the world

-Kuroda says there are 5 pillars of asian entertainment exports right now, other than videogames: 88rising, kpop, korean dramas, thai dramas, and anime

--boss says here that he has been in contact with foreign companies trying to sell BMSG's idea to produce content? like to produce content for BE:FIRST/BMSG i'm assuming? but that when the companies heard it's not anime, they weren't interested anymore? 

-Kuroda goes on to say that anime is only well known because it doesn't really have competition in that area, while for dramas and music Japan would have to fight very hard to be recognized

-moderator says the world knows the content Japan produced in the 80s/90s/00s but nothing recent out of that, because it was related to the boom in japanese exports at the time, and that since 2006 japanese exports have been going down

-Kuroda says Korea has been ahead of Japan in terms of music exports since 2009

-they go on to talk about how badly isolated Japan is in all of its entertainment industry, being music, movies, dramas, etc

-they talk about the difference in the process of producing content in the US vs Japan. in the US they spend a lot of time in pre production independently, they make pilots or short films to show the producers to get the greenlight, money is spent before even getting the green light for the project. while Japan needs to get greenlight first before spending any money or time on a project

-they also talk about how Japan has a law that forbids the creation of new broadcasting companies (?) so what exists now is all there is, there can't be new competition. this makes creativity difficult, because everyone is bound by what the current state of the industry is

-so they say the easiest way to solve this outside of the law is getting creators to publish their content abroad, with netflix for example or stuff like that. 

-so then they start talking about what can be done by a japanese company at home right now to change the state of the industry, and then Kuroda starts presenting "a case study" of what BMSG and stu are doing together with BE:FIRST's MVs

(i'm not entirely sure what the difference between shooting hours and shooting days is, because shooting days has different hours in the parenthesis lol maybe the hours spent on set by the boys, idk)

-the working relationship between stu and BMSG is two years old now [as of november 2022], since they started talking around the time boss established the company

-however, they only started getting involved in BE:FIRST's MV starting this spring [2022], because boss didn't know how things would go for BE:FIRST before that.

-they talk a lot about what they think is good quality and how much $$ that would take to make. boss was surprised to learn that not many teams in Japan are capable of executing his view of good quality (as in, they don't have the means to make such good quality videos)

-Kuroda says that a normal MV can cost anywhere from 1M to 5M yen, while top artists can spend from 5M up to 30M (this involved having a director with a specific vision etc)

-the business relationship basically worked as it follows: stu was interested in getting into live action production (rather than technology development, CG and animation which had been their main fields of work), boss needed a company that could keep up with him/them. as such stu started a new division that mainly works with BMSG

-their works so far: Betrayal Game, Scream, New Chapter, Message

-a lot of this has been trial and error for everyone

-basically they've learned if they want more cuts (more shots/clips/takes), they need more days for shooting, which is why they're taking longer now. 

-they've set up different studios with different directors to increase productivity  (so the boys can shoot their individual parts simultaneously etc)

-seeing how much work all of this is, boss makes it a point for the staff to be credited in the video itself and the description box on youtube. he wants them to get more work (basically, someone sees Betrayal Game and thinks it's cool so they want to hire stu/someone in particular from the team for a job, etc)

-he was surprised to learn how many people work in a MV 

-Message took the longest in terms of pre production but it was worth it. This includes the time it took Tanaka to write the script for the MV.

-The script included the main storyline, the background story for everyone's characters, the background information for the storyline, the whole shebang. 

-Tanaka also wrote the "script" for Betrayal Game (the boys have mentioned playing characters for the mv and getting background info about them)

-Tanaka is now developing a writer's room for stu, since he got to learn about it from his participation as a scriptwriter in "a big Japanese drama produced for a company headquartered in the US" (pretty sure he's talking about Tokyo Vice here, produced for HBO)

-Betrayal Game was a big technical challenge for everyone involved